The New York Times’ sloppiness when reporting on Christianity is proverbial, but perhaps none of its prior errors equals its claim this week that the apostle Saint Paul commanded Christians to kill the homosexuals among them.

With remarkable insouciance, NYT writers Jeremy W. Peters and Lizette Alvarez blithely make reference to “a Bible verse from Romans that calls for the execution of gays,” meaning Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans 1:18-32.

As anyone who has ever read the New Testament knows, Saint Paul never permits that Christians should commit any violence whatsoever against homosexuals, but the Times editors apparently thought that fact-checking with the original text was superfluous or that readers were too ignorant to check for themselves.

The Times report, titled “After Orlando, a Political Divide on Gay Rights Still Stands,” follows on the fatal shooting of 49 people in the Pulse nightclub by a 29-year-old Muslim who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. In the wake of the attack, many have tried to compare Christian beliefs regarding the morality of homosexuality with those of Islam, in an apparent attempt to make Christians guilty by association.

The biblical passage in question actually speaks of God’s anger toward sinners who reject God despite the abundance of evidence for his existence in creation. It says that those who failed to honor God “became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.”

Saint Paul continues: “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves.”

“For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error,” he wrote.

The passage ends with a list of the sort of behavior that displeased God:

They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious towards parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die—yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.

Last week Republican Congressman read this passage aloud to his colleagues, incurring the wrath of gay rights advocates who called on Republicans to condemn the “vile and dangerous remarks” contained in the biblical text.

“At a time when LGBT people face staggering rates of discrimination, harassment and violence, Representative Allen’s comments spread hate that does real harm,” Human Rights Campaign Senior Vice President said in a statement.

Wishing to censor the Bible as “hate speech,” however, would establish a dangerous precedent for religious liberty in America, a nation founded on Judeo-Christian principles, especially when the text in question condemns a whole series of actions that few manage to avoid.

The New York Times, which prides itself on its careful reporting, has a history of blunders when addressing Christianity.

In 2006, journalist Terry Mattingly wrote a column titled “Reporters, Crow’s Ears and Karma Light Nuns,” which documented a series of factual errors made by journalists when reporting on religion, beginning with the front-page gaffe by Ian Fisher, who referred to Pope John Paul’s metal staff as a “crow’s ear,” instead of the correct term of “crozier.”

In fairness, the New York Times isn’t the only group that has sought to implicate Christian teaching on homosexuality in the Orlando massacre.

In a blogpost, Bishop Robert Lynch said that Catholicism “targets” and “often breeds contempt for gays, lesbians and transgender people.” The seed of contempt, he said, turns into hatred, “which can ultimately lead to violence.” Unless this attitude changes, he states, “we can expect more Orlandos.”

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2 comments on “Gaffe of the Century! NYT Says St. Paul Ordered Christians to ‘Execute’ Homosexuals”

Ex-priest of the Maciel cult, Tom Williams, gives the passive reply, “Saint Paul never permits that Christians should commit any violence whatsoever against homosexuals.” While that’s correct, it fails to address what the Church taught about the crime of sodomy. The fact is that The Church has endorsed the death penalty, though not universally.

For an excellent summary of teachings and ordinances on the “libidinous crime against nature,” see the Appendix of In the Murky Waters of Vatican II by Atila Sinke Guimarães. The punishment of this crime prior to our modern times was always severe, and can be summarized as follows.

1) Punishment by death is not universal. This is based on the severe penances, e.g., 15 – 25 years, found in the early Church. While the Church does not execute law, it informs rulers and judges. As we see in (2) below, popes have exhorted the death penalty. That the Church legislated penances at times rather than delivering the offender to the executioners proves that Our Lord did not require the latter, as is the case with willful murder. (Hence, St. Paul is speaking of eternal death.)

2) Pope St. Pius V exhorted the state to severely punish sodomites, even to burn them at the stake, according to Guimarães. Quoting Ludovico von Pastor in Historia de los Papas:

On April 1, 1566, [St.Pius V] ordered that sodomites be turned over to the secular arm … The various imprisonments of sodomites … impressed Rome and frightened especially well established people, for it was known that the pope wanted his laws enforced even against the powerful. Indeed, to punish for vices against nature, the torments of the stake was applied throughout the pontificate of St. Pius V … An earlier papal Brief mandated that clerics who were guilty of that crime be stripped of all their posts, dignities, and income, and, after degradation, be handed over to the secular arm.

3) The death penalty is found throughout the history of western culture. From Guimarães: “The influence of the Justinian Code (ca 538) continued for centuries. It can be noted in Blackstone’s Comment on the Laws of England in the nineteenth century. Blackstone states: ‘The crime against nature … [must] be punished with death as required by the voice of nature and of reason, and the express law of God.’

One might ask, then, what is the difference between the Church and Islam, between St. Pius V and Omar the ISIS terrorist, on this issue? One obvious reply is that the Church always offers forgiveness and restoration of grace, reserving the most severe punishments only for the resolutely impenitent. The Church relies on the legitimately established secular government to implement the punishments, and does not tolerate that an individual would take the law into his own hands.

Islam, on the other hand, does not admit a secular court, but is one teaching and one law under a dictator. While there are many factions, the punishment of sodomites is universal (excepting men’s “use” of boys, of course), and the individual is free to implement the law, e.g., a husband setting his wife aflame for transgressions. The current climate in America is to ignore such distinctions.

Sodomy should be punished severely. However, we are very far from having the will to do so, and it cannot be changed overnight, nor without the conversion of America. We must remain resolutely opposed to the vice and be willing to suffer the consequences.

The bottom line is, it’s us or them, no in between (I’m speaking of homos here, but it’s true of Islam also.) Today, they understand this better than us, and they are moving rapidly to to subjugate and exterminate us.

[But … but … he called it homo-cidal! Oh, bad joke.
Poor pansies. It’s about you. It’s always about you.]

The LGBT news outlet “PinkNews” has censured Pope Francis for his failure to expressly call out the gay community in his statement of grief and condemnation for the brutal killing of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando last Sunday.

In the official Vatican statement, Papal spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said the Pope experienced “the deepest feelings of horror and condemnation, of pain and turmoil before this new manifestation of homicidal folly and senseless hatred.”

The statement said that Pope Francis “joins the families of the victims and all of the injured in prayer and in compassion,” praying that the Lord will comfort the victims’ families and friends and that “the causes of such terrible and absurd violence which so deeply upsets the desire for peace of the American people and of the whole of humanity” might promptly be identified and counteracted.

This statement was not good enough for PinkNews, which chastised the Pope for failing “to even acknowledge that the attack was homophobic or that it took place in a gay club.”

The news outlet said that in his role as the head of the Catholic Church, the Pope released an official statement “but it failed to actually mention that any the victims were gay, or that the shooting was homophobic, or that it took place in a gay bar.”

In point of fact, the Pope also omitted the fact that the shooter was Muslim, that he was allegedly gay himself, or that the killing took place almost a year to the day after the Charleston church shooting in 2015.